Failure is one of the most difficult things in life to deal with. Even something so small as missing a joke, or not getting a perfect grade on an exam can make anyone feel just terrible for the rest of the day. Every day it seems as though the stakes seem to be getting higher and higher. How can a person go home to their parents to explain wasting over a thousand dollars on a class they failed? How can anyone explain that there just wasn’t enough hours in a day to get everything done they wanted to?

Sadly the truth is at one point or another we all must fail something. Even the best of us crack. I have always gone to schools in which failure was not an option. If you failed, you might as well have died. But as I said, at some point we all do. So how do we as humans reconcile the fact that failure can be so demoralizing, and yet we still must do it? My major way of doing this is to breath, and let it go. I know this sounds ridiculous, and I get accused of not caring regularly by the people I fail, but it is the only way that I have found to succeed.

I used to describe each one of us as a tapestry, on one side we are beautiful, on the other a mess of knots. When we fail and refuse to let it go, we make a really big knot that eventually destroys our entire tapestry. I know how much this concept scares people, it scared me. Failing scared me, I would have crippling anxiety, I would refuse to do things for fear that they would not be good enough, and had many sleepless nights over whether what I would do was enough.

But the fact is though that the test I was so afraid of did not define my life. Yes, it might change it, but it does not determine it. I determined my life. I chose what school I went to, I chose my program, I chose to keep going. The same is true for you. The only way for anything to determine your life is for you to allow it. The only way for you to allow it is for you to get emotionally worked up and worried about it and make choices based on how you feel instead of logical fact.

My ending point is this, we are all human, but as humans, it is sometimes for those above to forget what it was like to be one below. The way to control where you fit on this map is to control exactly how you respond to the natural disasters life gives you. I believe in you, I believe in all of us.